Tsai Ing-wen
Tsai Ing-wen was president of Taiwan from 2016 to 2024, the first woman, the trade lawyer with the Cornell master's and the London School of Economics doctorate who had negotiated the island's entry into the World Trade Organisation, run the mainland affairs council under Chen, taken the Democratic Progressive Party after its defeat of 2008, lost the presidential election of 2012 by six points and won that of 2016 by twenty-five. She governed eight years in which Peking refused to speak to her because she would not say the words of the 1992 consensus, cut off the tourists, took away nine of the island's remaining diplomatic allies, flew its aircraft into the air defence zone daily from 2020, and held the live-fire exercises around the island of August 2022 after the American speaker Pelosi's visit. She rebuilt the defence budget, extended conscription to a year, built the submarines the island had not been able to buy, and made the semiconductor industry, TSMC's ninety per cent of the world's advanced chips, the silicon shield that was her foreign policy. The pandemic, in which Taiwan closed its border in January 2020 and had seven deaths in the first year, was the moment the world learned the island's name. The same-sex marriage law of May 2019, the first in Asia, passed after a referendum had said no, was the other. She was born in Taipei in 1956, the youngest of eleven children of a car-repair businessman of Hakka and Paiwan descent, studied law at National Taiwan University, Cornell and the LSE, taught, and entered government as a trade negotiator in the 1990s under Lee Teng-hui, for whom she drafted the special state-to-state formula of 1999. She joined the DPP only in 2004, which the party's old guard never let her forget. She was its chairwoman from 2008. The election of January 2020, won with eight million votes, the most ever, on the island's watching of Hong Kong's protests, and the party's loss of the local elections of 2018 and 2022, after each of which she resigned the chairmanship, were the rhythm. The pension reform of 2017 that cut the civil servants' and teachers' benefits, the labour law changes, and the energy transition away from nuclear toward gas and wind that the blackouts of 2021 tested were the domestic account. She handed over in May 2024 to her vice-president Lai, whom Peking dislikes more. She has travelled since to the European capitals that would not receive her in office, saying that Taiwan is already independent and does not need to declare it, which is the formula she governed by.
- Lived: 1956 CE – ?
- Nationality: Taiwanese
- Roles: president, politician
